Comparison - Samsung Galaxy S3 vs Nokia Lumia 900

12 June 2012 - The Samsung Galaxy S3 or Samsung Galaxy SIII was announced a month ago. The Nokia Lumia 900 was announced in January 2012.

The Samsung Galaxy S3 is obviously the successor to the very successful Galaxy S2, and we think that Samsung has made another super phone for the Android OS.

The Nokia Lumia 900 is a follow up to the Lumia 800. It has a few tweaks and adjustments, and the most talked-about one is the inclusion of LTE capabilities.

Both devices have similar 8-megapixel cameras, but the Samsung records video at 1080p maximum, while the Nokia tops out at 720p.

The Samsung Galaxy S3 has a giant 4.8-inch screen, with 720 x 1280 pixels. In addition to having better resolution, it displays on a Super AMOLED screen while the Lumia 900 is on plain vanilla AMOLED.

It has a 1.4 GHz quad-core processor inside, which by all reasonable assumption, has to be faster than the single-core 1.4 GHz processor in the Nokia. There is double system memory (1024 vs 512 MB RAM) and the option to get the same or twice the storage of the Nokia (16/32 GB vs 16GB)

It is also one of the first phones to start accepting 64GB microSD cards, so there is a lot of storage inside this device. There is also plenty more battery (2100 vs 1450 mAh) to drive the quad-core and the larger screen.

The Nokia Lumia 900 weighs slightly more (160 vs 144g). It has a 4.3-inch AMOLED screen, as opposed to the Super AMOLED screen on the rival device.

The Samsung Salaxy S3 is to retail for S$ 998, while the Nokia Lumia 900 is S$ 849. We would have to say that the S3 is the better deal here, although S3 will cost S$ 149 more.

It is quite hard to recommend a phone with a processor that is one fourth of its rival’s speed, even if only just on paper. Although the cameras are both rated at 8-megapixels, the ICS OS on the Samsung allows for fancy burst photography where multiple photos are taken in quick succession.

About the only thing that has been said against the Galaxy S3 is that it has a rather tacky plastic casing. If you can live with that, then the choice is pretty much in favour of the Korean brand.

There is an 8-megapixel camera with LED flash that is capable of recording 1080p full HD video at 30fps and take photos simultaneously. It is also a quad-band device and supports HSPA+ (21Mbps), WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n, energy efficient Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, GPS and GLONASS.

Nokia’s latest Windows Phone flagship has a 4.3-inch AMOLED display with ClearBlack technology and it is definitely bigger than the Lumia 800 display. The Nokia Lumia 900 is powered by a 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor with 512MB of RAM. It is running on the Mango version of Windows Phone.

There is a front-facing camera and an 8-megapixel camera with 28mm f/2.2 Carl Zeiss lens and dual-flash. The Lumia 900 comes with the Tango application which enables video chats.